Tomorrowish Gains Unmatched Flexibility with ProfitBricks Cloud

Situation

Tomorrowish is the first Social Media DVR ™. The service allows viewers of popular TV shows to view and send tweets in a real time synchronized feed while viewing previously aired episodes. A key benefit of the service is the ability for viewers to see tweeted conversations that originally accompanied the show – both during and after the live broadcast. Tomorrowish is also a powerful tool for digital media content creators. By capturing, curating and streaming social media commentary, they are able to take their broadcast content to the next level. And by making it available after the initial broadcast has aired, it allows the conversation to be extended and expanded. The audience can relive the social buzz that took place at the moment it happen during the broadcast sometimes with added social content from the show producers and talent. Tomorrowish also offers an embeddable social stream widget for websites. Combined with a media player, the widget creates a potent new tool that allows video content to be synced with any targeted social stream commentary generated for it.

“Shortly after initial development work on Tomorrowish began utilizing the traditional LAMP stack (Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, and Python), I reached out to a college friend, Dan Afonso – president of managed service provider Enfold I.T., for technical guidance and expertise,” says Mick Darling, Founder/President of Tomorrowish. “Although we initially did our work on the EC2 Cloud, we didn’t like the way AWS forced us into their development model.”

We find the ProfitBricks Data Center Designer tool (DCD) to be very intuitive and simple to use. The DCD is built on top of an API, so that means that whatever the API can do can be done in the DCD. That’s powerful.

Dan Afonso, Presient of EnFold I.T.

Solution

Tomorrowish and Enfold I.T. found that AWS, a first generation Cloud provider, was much more difficult to configure and manage than their traditional on-premise development server environment. “What we could set-up and configure in the office in an hour took a full day on AWS,” says Dan Afonso of Enfold I.T. “Their set-up process and deployment workflow is complex. An organization has to do a lot of extra work in order to have a really simple set-up.”

It was time to explore alternative options. Tomorrowish learned about ProfitBricks at a local technology event and was intrigued by both its technology and their commitment to the start-up community.

When Mick Darling and Dan Afonso began to rethink their relationship with AWS, they had three overarching areas that had to be addressed by a new Cloud Computing provider: ease of use, unmatched flexibility, and performance. It also had to offer incredible affordability.

Unlike traditional virtual server providers, ProfitBricks allows us to fully-modify the three essential configuration points - CPU cores, RAM and disk space (storage) – including vertically scaling our MySQL servers up to 196GB of RAM. This enables us to architect for our specific needs and requirements, achieving optimum resources at an ideal price. Since our resource requirements constantly change, performance of our ProfitBricks servers can be adjusted at any time without a reboot.

Mick Darling, Founder/President of Tomorrowish

Benefits

Ease of use
The best way to plan and architect a data center environment is by hand, using a marker and a large whiteboard to outline, correct and improve the complete infrastructure design. Most cloud computing IaaS providers require that you convert these drawings into text tables of virtual servers and storage, before adding IP addresses – a cumbersome and error prone process that can force you to start over from scratch, completely replacing your previous configurations.

ProfitBricks offers an intuitive drag and drop – Data Center Designer (DCD) - that does so much more than a whiteboard. Tomorrowish and Enfold I.T. created their virtual data centers with servers, storage, load balancers, firewalls and associated networking using the DCD.

“We find the ProfitBricks Data Center Designer tool (DCD) to be very intuitive and simple to use. The DCD is built on top of an API, so that means that whatever the API can do can be done in the DCD. That’s powerful, adds Afonso”

Flexibility/Scalability
The ProfitBricks platform provides Tomorrowish with incredible flexibility, allowing their virtual infrastructure to grow both vertically and horizontally. “Elasticity is extremely important because of our MySQL implementation,” says Darling. “Unlike traditional virtual server providers, ProfitBricks allows us to fully-modify the three essential configuration points - CPU cores, RAM and disk space (storage) – including vertically scaling our MySQL servers up to 196GB of RAM. This enables us to architect for our specific needs and requirements, achieving optimum resources at an ideal price. Since our resource requirements constantly change, performance of our ProfitBricks servers can be adjusted at any time without a reboot.”

Performance
Rather than using traditional 1 GBit or 10 Gbit Ethernet-based networks as most other Cloud providers, ProfitBricks customers notice incredible network speed, considerably faster and more efficient due to high-performance InfiniBand mesh technology. With a current transmission speed of 80 Gbit/s, InfiniBand is eight times faster than the current fastest Ethernet at 10 GBit. Additionally, InfiniBand is also considerably more efficient as network collisions are eliminated, even under high load situations.

Affordability
To say that cloud computing pricing models are astonishingly confusing and complex is an understatement. First generation Cloud Computing providers make comparison extremely difficult due to disparaging pricing models ranging from subscriptions paid in advance and auction-style resource “bidding” systems to variable pricing dependent on a provider’s current system load. On top of that, those same providers will typically add fees for items such as customer support, system admin-level troubleshooting, and I/O requests to a storage system. The consequence of such creative Cloud Computing costs is that pricing is nearly impossible to estimate, giving customers a nasty shock when the charges ultimately hit the credit card.

ProfitBricks is different, offering a clear, simple pricing model, eliminating surprises, and based on 4 known parameters – CPU Cores, RAM, Disk Storage, and Bandwidth. ProfitBricks does not charge additional for commonly requested features such as Unlimited internal networks and internal network bandwidth, firewalls, unlimited load balancers, redundant storage unit included with every data storage unit, isolated virtual data center including with free networking options, support from Senior-Level SysAdmins, and use of ProfitBricks API.